Humans readily make inferences about the behavioral context of the music they hear. These inferences tend to be accurate, even if the songs are in foreign languages or unfamiliar musical idioms: upon hearing a Blackfoot lullaby, a Korean listener with no experience of Blackfoot music, language, or broader culture is far more likely to judge the music’s function as “to soothe a baby” than as “for dancing”. Are such inferences shaped by musical exposure or does the human mind naturally detect certain links between musical form and function? Children’s developing experiences with music provide a clear test of this question. We studied musical inferences in a large sample of children (𝑁 = 2,418), who heard dance, lullaby, and healing songs from 70 world cultures and were tasked with guessing the original behavioral context in which each was performed. We found little evidence for the effect of experience on musical inferences: children reliably inferred the original behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs, with only minimal improvement in performance from the youngest (age 3 or younger) to the oldest (age 12) participants. Children’s inferences tightly correlated with those of adults for the same songs, as collected from a similar massive online experiment (𝑁 = 85,068). Moreover, the same acoustic features explained variability in both children’s and adults’ inferences. These findings imply that accurate inferences about the behavioral contexts of music, driven by links between form and function in music across cultures, do not require extensive musical experience.
Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs
